


Lord of the Bloatflies

by Raiven_Raine



Series: Kill, Laugh, Love [1]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 76
Genre: AO3 FB Challenge, Background Slash, Canon-Typical Raider Children, Crude Humor, Explicit Language, Gen, Humor, Is that Deacon from Fallout 4? But how?, Light drug use, Other, Pre-Slash, Raider History - The Creation of Raiders, alcohol use, crude language, fun with fanfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-29
Updated: 2019-01-29
Packaged: 2019-10-18 13:40:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 15,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17581937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Raiven_Raine/pseuds/Raiven_Raine
Summary: This work is part of the Ao3 Facebook Challenge - What does this group mean to you?- - - - - - -Draven, stuck babysitting three rambunctious raider kids, keeps them occupied with a story.How he found friendship, love, camaraderie, and joy in a group of people out in the wasteland, bound together by their love of telling stories.Oh... And they also happened to be raiders...- - - - - - -There are writing references and parallels abound and the allegory beast has run amok in this fic as I answer the question - What does the Ao3 FB group mean to me?- - - - - - -





	1. Once Upon A Time

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ravenous77](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ravenous77/gifts).



> _Ao3 FB Challenge -_
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> _"January is the group's anniversary month (the 11th with be year 4 since I created the group). Last year, the group had just barely passed 5k members, which we had a challenge for. This year, we are just shy of 14k members and we are still going strong despite everything that can come with having a larger group. I honestly never imagined even hitting the 5k mark so breaking 10,000 members is just astounding to me. And for the core values of the group remain what I want them to be just makes me so proud of all of you for making this group someplace others love and benefit from._
> 
> _Okay, so the challenge of the month is to write a fic where the theme answers this question:_
> 
> _What does this group mean to you?_
> 
> _Is it support, fun, a place to open up or belong, inspiration, community? Something else? Put it into words for a fic. No length, fandom, or pairing requirements."_  
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> \- - - - - - - - - - - 
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> ** It is somewhat difficult to write for a fandom like Fallout 76, since there are no living humans other than players. But there are many terminal entries, holotapes, and notes left by the people who came before. This fic is based around a location called 'Bleeding Kate's Grindhouse' and the characters who once inhabited it. The Grindhouse, for those who may not be familiar, is a raider encampment that had a movie screen set up and rows of seating... These guys raided to find films to watch. They were ridiculously bored, apparently.
> 
> ** Special thanks to my daughter, Ravenous77, for her help with this fic. I forced her to read it out loud and act out the majority of the story because I am not very well versed in writing in first person (i've only attempted doing so once before with the fic 'Reading Between the Lines' and that was just a small amount... i also have a difficult time reading first person so i don't have much to gauge my ability on... my daughter was a great help in this process) - because she acted out the majority of this fic and read it out loud (and i happened to record it) we will be working on producing and posting accompanying holotapes to this fic on youtube and other audio formats in the near future! GET EXCITED!  
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> \- - - - - - - - - - - 
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> **Bleeding Kate's Grindhouse**  
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> \- - - - - - - - - - - 

  
  
  
  
  


###  **\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -**

Isaia took the strange gun-shaped object from the younger kid and turned it over in his hands, “I dunno what kind of weapon it is, but it’s not a gun,” he pointed to the front, “look, there’s a lense on the muzzle.”

The other kid, HK, took it back and examined the lense. “Maybe it shoots some kind of laser.”

“Lemme see it,” Oliver reached out toward the two older boys to try and get the thing. 

HK jerked it away from him and held it up out of the little boy’s reach, “you can have it if you can get it,” he snorted. 

“Yoink!” Isaia laughed as he took it from the middle boy’s hand and a game of keep-away started up between the three of them.

Draven rolled his eyes at the kids and snatched the thing from the oldest boy as he came near. “Careful with this, you little shits.” He huddled the object close to his chest almost lovingly as he sat back down on the couch. 

“What even is it?” Isaia wrinkled his nose. 

HK nodded, “yeah, I’ve never seen a weapon like that before.”

“It’s a handheld recorder.” At their continued look of confusion, the man added, “for making films.”

Oliver waved a hand dismissively, “it ain’t even a weapon.”

“Bullshit it’s not a weapon.” Draven pointed it at Ollie and the little boy ducked down instinctively. “Ever hear the phrase, _‘the pen is mightier than the sword’?”_

Isaia snorted, “whoever said that was stupid.”

“You can stab someone with a pen, though,” the youngest boy pantomimed stabbing himself in the neck and dying dramatically.

Draven blinked stupidly at him for a moment. “That’s not what it means…” 

Sometimes he forgot that these little raider brats had been born and raised in the new world wasteland and didn’t think like those from vaults or before the war. The only time the kids would read a book was if they’d been tied to a chair and forced to do it like some sort of strange torture. They just weren’t reading the right books. They really should read _A Clockwork Orange…_ Draven decided he would find a copy of that book one day and these damn kids would read it. 

There were about eighty raiders in their camp and somehow he got stuck on babysitting duty, but he figured it could probably be worse. The kids weren’t so bad… They just tended to get into everything, locked up and hidden away or not. Draven often felt a lot of pride that they were so clever, but he got irritated when it was _his_ shit that they’d gotten into.

Draven pointed the recorder at the kids and motioned as if holding them hostage, “sit down, I’m gonna tell you a story.”

“About pens and swords?” HK rolled his eyes as he drug a chair over to sit next to the couch. 

“Yes,” Draven nodded, “and how a small band of people ended up becoming the biggest and best group in all the wasteland.”

“With a shitload of guns,” Isaia gave a knowing look as he sat down cross-legged on the coffee table in front of Draven.

HK shook his head as he looked over at the older boy beside him, “no way, probably explosives. No such thing as too many grenades.” He pulled a grenade from his jacket pocket and held it up with a loving smile.

Draven leaned forward and snatched the grenade from the boy’s hand and HK frowned as he tried in vain to grab it back.

“Bet it was aliens!” Oliver said as he hopped up on the couch beside Draven and made himself comfortable.

Isaia stared at the little boy and idly picked up a bottle of vodka from the table he was sitting on. “That’s stupid.”

“You’re stupid,” Oliver snapped back.

Just before the kid could put it to his mouth, Draven plucked the bottle from the oldest boy’s hand then grinned at Ollie, “you’re not wrong…”

“Hey!” Isaia frowned up at the man.

“Not the stupid part, the aliens part...” Draven took a long drink from the pilfered bottle. “And cowboys, spies, supernatural stuff, monsters--”

“Now who’s the stupid one…” Isaia mumbled as he made himself more comfortable on the table, sans alcohol.

“Shut your cakeholes and I’ll explain,” Draven glared. 

Isaia raised an eyebrow at the man, “is this gonna be another one of your weird chem-fueled hallucination stories?”

“Like that time a yao guai came flying outta nowhere and saved you from super mutants,” Oliver acted it out with his hands as he spoke.

HK rolled his eyes, “or the time a scorchbeast popped up out of the ground in front of you and dumped a horde of scorched on you but you somehow lived?”

“Or that one time when you discovered a secret Chinese spy camp underneath Mama Dolce’s…” Isaia continued. 

Draven narrowed his eyes at them and pointed sternly, “first of all, those things happened. All of them. Second, do you brats wanna hear the story or not?”

Isaia shrugged, “only if there’s blood and guts in it.” 

“And explosions,” HK added excitedly.

Oliver nodded with a wide grin, “and food.”

The other two kids blinked at the little boy.

“What?” Ollie shrugged, “I’m hungry.”

HK waved a hand at him dismissively, “you’re always hungry.”

“Well, you’re in luck,” Draven pulled a can of cram from the end table beside the couch and handed it to the little boy, “cuz it has all those things.” 

“Cool!” The kids said in unison.

“At first," the man got more comfortable in his seat as he began, "people got the idea in their heads to set up little trading camps on roads, but then other assholes would just come along and kill them, steal their shit, teabag their corpses, and be on their merry way. I don’t expect you know what teabagging is, but--”

“We know what it is and nobody does that in real life,” Isaia rolled his eyes. 

Draven cocked an eyebrow, “I’ve done it.”

“That’s cuz you’re weird,” HK snorted.

The man narrowed his eyes slightly, “can I finish?” 

HK tipped his chin and pointed at him, “are you going to start talking about your junk?” 

“This is an important history lesson, it’s how you came to be…” Draven pointed at the kid, “so yeah, there’ll be some talk of junk.”

“Pretty sure we ain’t your kids,” Isaia waved a hand and rolled his eyes again.

“Yeah? Who’s your pa?” Draven cocked his head to the side and waited for them to try and give him an answer. 

They couldn’t. The kids looked at one another, Ollie shrugged, then they fell silent again. 

Draven gave a nod, “that’s what I thought. So, as I was saying…” He settled back into the couch, “some people would kill a trader and take their little camp then spruce the place up with some decorations in the form of traps, spikes, and walls. These guys made the camp into a roadblock to be able to squeeze some supplies out of anyone who was walking down the road.” 

“Seems smart,” HK gave a thoughtful nod.

“Well it isn’t,” Draven snorted, “I have no idea how it even became a popular thing to do as if people can’t just walk around the piles of shit people think walls should be made out of, but some of these little camps started to become targets for groups of ambitious travelers. So a group would take over a smaller group’s camp, then wait around with their thumbs up their asses for an even bigger group to come take it from them, in turn. The cycle led to large camps being built by asshats and decorated with dead bodies, blood, and heads as big warning signs to smart people, but more of a personal challenge to dumbasses with more balls than brains who felt like testing their mettle.” 

Isaia smirked, “were you one of those dumbasses?”

Draven pointed sternly at the boy, “first of all, I don’t appreciate your tone and second… Yes, I was.”  
  


###  **\- - - - - - - - - - - - -**

I was, like most, a really optimistic young adult when I came out of my vault. I had no idea what it’d be like out in the world, but I was raised my whole life by smart folks who had a lot of speculations. They couldn’t have been further from the actuality of the outside shitstorm situation if they’d have been sucked up by a tornado from said shitstorm and spit the fuck out somewhere over the rainbow. In fact, falling down a rabbit hole and landing in any other dimension would have been closer to the truth. Movies and books made by writers high out of their gourds on hallucinogens prepared me more for the outside post-war life than any vault scientist ever did.

People like to think the best of humanity. We like to think we’re smart and wholesome and fair. That we’re morally good. Truth is… We’re all assholes. Just for different reasons. I know you don’t wanna hear it, but there it is. Humans are animals and that saying about the meek inheriting the earth is pure bullshit. 

In a vault, the craziest way to die was slipping in the shower or falling out of bed. And don’t laugh, people die all the time from falling out of beds. So, when the scariest thing in your entire life is a wet floor, coming out to a world full of giant monsters with anger management issues, an environment hell-bent on the destruction of every cell in a human body, and bat-shit insane paranoid people fighting for their survival can be a major shock to the system. About three million volts of a shock right through your body from eyeballs to asshole.

I’d lost two people from my vault group before an entire day had even passed. Not even twelve hours in and the first one to go was an older man who swore he’d keep us safe because he was actually a soldier in the war. He was pretty good right out the gate… Until we met the first Lovecraftian nightmare of a beast and learned several valuable new life lessons. Number one being... Do not ever fuck with a deathclaw. 

Second to go was a guy who thought he knew more than Mr. Deathclaw Chow and, guess what? He didn’t. So the next lesson we learned from that wonderful experience was to never let your guard down… Especially while taking a shit. If you need to shit, you better take along a shit-buddy or two. Modesty takes a backseat to survival. Way in the back seat. Keel-hauled behind the bus of a back seat.

So, equipped with our newfound firsthand knowledge of things, the three of us that remained made it several months before shit hit the fan. Me and my two good friends, Henry and Jakob, made a pretty decent team. We had been shoved out of the nest to fly and did pretty good with it when all the other baby birds had hit the ground. But birds can’t fly forever. Gotta land sometime. And, all too often, when a bird lands a predator will strike. 

Desperation will make people do crazy shit. As animals, we are driven to survive and make sure our offspring survive. When winter hit hard, a lot of people were starting to run low on supplies. Now, this is where those aforementioned roadside traders comes into the picture. 

They were great, so long as people were civil. Unfortunately, war-ravaged lawless lands do not know the meaning of the word ‘civil’ and desperate people who were driven by hunger started taking things from traders and other easy targets. Those folks would fight to defend their supplies and people wound up dead. But humans are a very adaptable sort of beast and started to become more aggressive or tricky as required to get the food and supplies they needed. 

Me and my friends weren’t those types of assholes. Not back then in the beginning, anyway. We’d try hunting or looting old pre-war homes before we’d ever steal from traders and other folks just trying to survive. Until we came across our first group of ‘others’ who were out there playing the Badger Game. 

A young woman, crying for help, caught Jake’s attention. Fucking Jakob and his sweet pure heart… He had to help her. She led him to a house and they took his shit and killed him when he tried to defend himself and keep his junk. They’d killed my friend for the shitty torn clothes he was wearing, duct taped boots, a dull knife, a broken gun, and two cans of dog food. That’s how much his life was worth. 

I was, understandably, pissed right the fuck off and retaliated violently. He had been my friend. I grew up with him and he was part of my threesome group. These two guys were all I had in the universe and he died because he was too fucking nice for this shit-ass new world. 

Lesson three. Don’t trust anyone. 

Then it was me and Henry against the world for a few more months. We’d made it just shy of a year out of the vault and had set up a home for ourselves. We worked pretty hard to keep it stocked up with food and supplies and Henry even started a little garden out back. The only problem with the garden, other than the asston of work it took to keep it growing and safe from animals, was that the fucker grew tomatoes. I fucking hate tomatoes. There is not a worse crop I can imagine except for the actual things that kept growing from the majority of the strange tomato seeds. Some weird-ass cross-disaster of a potato and shit-tomato. A tato, as he called it. I called it disgusting, no matter how it was cooked. I’ll just stick to my cans of dog food and cram, thank you very much. But Henry loved his shittato-things so, whatever. More dog food for me. A phrase I never thought I would say.

We liked to keep the place looking fairly nice. Patched up the roof and walls, painted, kept the area clear of weeds and overgrowth. It was nice. Even had a white picket fence. A busted picket fence, but still… Looked like a model house right out of a post-apocalypse home and garden magazine. 

Apparently, making a nice place put a huge target on the house. 

Figured that one out much too late… 

Henry was killed in his garden one day. I’d been hurt but managed to kill off the attacking group of people, but I’d lost my life that day. My one friend left. Dead. I just sat there on my knees in the garden for hours after. Bleeding, hurt, crying until I couldn’t cry any longer. Henry was taken from me and I was truly and utterly alone. 

I buried him in his garden and tried to push myself to keep going. Keep living. Surviving. I let the crops die, but more people still came to take everything else I had left until I was forced to leave the nice little house with the white picket fence. The place pre-war folks only dreamt of owning and the life they’d dreamt of living back before the bombs. 

That lesson was one too many people had been learning… Why work hard to survive when you can let someone else do the work then just take it from them?

So, as you can imagine, I was pretty lonely and desperate after trying to survive on my own for a while. Weeks… Maybe months. I have no idea how long I was all alone, it’d been Henry’s job to keep track of that shit. He seemed to think keeping track of days was important. It’s not. He’d put a calendar on the wall so he could know when there was a holiday or a birthday we could try to celebrate. What good is that shit now? I can’t even remember how old I am, exactly, but he’d said it was important to keep old world traditions and culture alive. 

I’ve long since forgotten a lot of that holiday shit, but I do manage to remember around the time Christmas is still to this day. Christmas was Henry’s favorite. 

When I stumbled upon a large shithead-roadblock camp set up in the middle of the highway, I thought it must have been Christmas. It was a gift. A gift wrapped up in spikes, human heads, blood, and bodies. I didn’t care… It was the most beautiful thing I’d seen in a long time. 

The fence above the entryway had _‘Bleeding Kate’s Grindhouse’_ painted in big rusty-red letters with what I could only assume had been blood. Charming. Say one thing about raiders, say they sure can stick to a decorating theme. 

The guard standing watch in a tower over the fence spotted me immediately and I tried to act cool as I walked right up to the doors. I had nothing left to lose and this was a chance for me to either be done with it all or make a friend. I was leaning more toward the friend option, but if she gave me the gift of a bullet to the head, that probably would have been just as fine. 

Instead of a parting gift delivered from the barrel of a rifle, however, I received a pat down, a mandatory pilfering of my weapons, and a greeting.

“Name’s Kate… You lookin’ for trouble?” 

“I’m not really looking for anything.” That had been a lie, I was definitely in the market for a new group of friends to join. “Maybe a place to sleep for the night?” I added carefully.

“Today’s your lucky day, kiddo,” Kate grinned in a strange unsettling way that led me to believe it was _not_ my lucky day, “I’m goin’ to let you in.” 

I tried to hide my excitement but probably failed completely. She must have sensed it because just before I stepped through the gates, she put a hand on my chest to stop me.

“You gotta do something for me in return, though…” She cocked her head to the side and raised an eyebrow like some sort of predator regarding a rabbit for lunch.

“I’m not really up for killing or hurting anyone…” Another lie. By this point, I was shattered and would have done anything she asked. I would have even eaten a shittato if this woman told me to because that’s just how desperate I’d been at the time. 

“Naw,” she waved a hand flippantly, “nothin’ like that. Give me a yes or no.”

“Um…” I pretended to think really hard about it, “sure, I guess. What is it?”

With that, Kate pointed into her camp, “I’ll tell you after the ten cent tour.”

So the entire time I was wondering what the hell she’d have me do and my curiosity grew by leaps and bounds as she showed me around. 

Most of it looked like any other large raider camp. It had the obligatory dead bodies in cages and heads on spikes, which is a ridiculously unsanitary practice and it made no sense to me at the time why they’d be on the inside of the camps like that, but they were there in true stereotypical fashion. 

The thing that hit me the hardest was that they had a cinema screen set up on one wall and rows of seating just like the theater room back in the vault I’d lived in. Half of this camp was a movie room. Well, I say ‘room’, but it had no roof, which would have been a great addition for keeping rain off moviegoers, but I’m getting ahead of myself. This was the strangest thing I’d ever seen so far. In a world that was now dictated by survival and not doing superfluous bullshit, here was a group of raiders with a cinema screen and chairs set up as though their way of life revolved around it. And revolve around it they did. 

I couldn’t get past this movie set-up even as she was introducing me to the other people. 

She pointed to each of the three men in turn, “this here is Jamus, that’s Danny, and he’s John.”

“Ryan,” the man she’d introduced as John said with a smile.

“What?” Kate wrinkled her nose at the man.

“It’s Ryan now,” he shrugged.

The two of them stared at one another for a moment before she turned back to me with a sigh, “okay, he’s apparently Ryan… Until he changes his name again for the seven hundredth time.”

He waved a hand at her, “it’s only been eight.”

“Hundred,” she snorted.

These people weren’t exactly like what I’d been used to around the wasteland… Of course, I’d only just met them and they were really fucking weird. The end of civilization as we know it and isolation tends to have strange impacts on people. 

“So anyway,” the woman smiled, “you’re gonna make a movie.”

“I am?” Now this was something I’d never expected.

“Yes.” She motioned to the young men and Jamus handed her a camera. 

“What kind of movie?” I couldn’t believe this was real... She had to be fucking with me somehow.

Kate shrugged, “doesn’t matter, just make something we can watch. We’ve gone through our collection a million times over and have resorted to watching some guy’s pre-war home baby movies. Boring shit, but got me thinking… We can make our own and share them. So that’s what we do. We have this space as a place we can make our own stuff and share it with each other for entertainment in this boring world.”

Ryan nodded, “think of it like an initiation to get in. If you wanna get in, that is…” 

Fuck yes I wanted to get in! I played it cool and shrugged as I took the handheld recorder, “I guess… Any ideas on what it should be about?”

They thought for a moment and Jamus was the first to speak up, “I like funny shit. And cowboys. The westerns we have are great. Make a funny western. Oh, and aliens. Add aliens. Make it like aliens versus cowboys.”

I blinked at him dumbly for a moment and chose to completely ignore the insane mention of aliens, “where am I supposed to get cowboy hats and horses?”

Kate laughed, “you don’t need a cowboy hat and horse to be a cowboy. But never mind that shit, supernatural cryptid stuff is a lot more entertaining and easier to do.” She motioned out toward the entryway, “there’s a lotta crazy monsters out there to capture on film. I say do that. If you can manage to get a wendigo on film, you’ve got my attention.”

“Wendigo?” I was pretty sure I’d ever seen one of those… Yet. 

“That’s a great idea…” Danny spoke up, “if you wanna get yourself killed. Fuck all that nonsense and do a romance…”

Ryan laughed at that, “you mean _porn.”_

“That’s what I said,” Danny smirked, “but with a plot. I like my porn to have plot.”

I looked down at the recorder in my hands then to everyone around me. “You… Want me to make a porn?”

They looked at each other then back to me and nodded. They seemed pretty excited about that particular idea, but I didn’t. Not if I was supposed to be in it, anyway. I looked at Ryan, figuring he was going to toss his crazy two cents in on the idea of what to create. And he did. 

“Spies,” Ryan grinned. Then he added, “and time travel.”

How the fuck was I supposed to do time travel?! I really wanted to make something that’d get me in good with these people, but their ideas were all conflicting and I couldn’t see how they’d ever go together in any cohesive way.

“How about…” I thought about it for a minute, “if I just do some retelling of a classic tale or some story based on a thing that exists already?” 

“Sounds good,” Kate shrugged. 

She really didn’t seem to care at all what the film should be about, so long as it was entertaining in some way. I could work with that. I figured I could just do a quick film recreation of some little kid’s fairy tale and be done with it and get in with this group. Figured that’d be easy enough. 

I realized later on that my ego wouldn’t allow me to half-ass this project and I would end up going all out, balls to the wall, full-on crazy with my idea and I would inevitably drag a bunch of people into the shitshow with me.

So, I took their recorder and thought about a quick little story I could do. 

I thought of a good one that I had always liked as a kid and seemed to ring true to my new life outside the vault…  
  


###  **\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -**


	2. Interpersonal Relationships

  
  
  
  
  


###  **\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -**

Draven leaned over the back of the couch and rummaged another open crate to try and find something else to drink.

“What book did you do?” Ollie impatiently asked as he leaned over the back of the couch next to the man.

“Well, I ended up mostly writing my own spin on it and spun it so out of control it was almost just some strange-ass alternate universe setting for the original story…” Draven found a half-empty bottle of whiskey and mentally cheered about it as he turned back around and wasted no time drinking from it. 

“You wrote a story?” HK shot him a skeptical look. 

Draven shrugged, “sure... I used to write a bit of poetry back in the vault, so I figured--”

“Poetry? You wrote _poetry?!”_ Isaia immediately scoffed.

HK snorted, “that’s dumb.”

“You’re dumb,” Draven glared. “Poetry can be cool.”

“oh yeah?” Isaia crossed his arms and cocked his head, “tell us a _cool_ poem.”

Draven thought for a moment then grinned, 

_“Remember when nearly sixteen,_  
_On your very first date as a teen,_  
_At the movies? If yes,_  
_Then I bet you can't guess,_  
_What was shown on the cinema screen.”_

The kids blinked stupidly, glanced at one another, then Oliver spoke up, “I don’t get it…”

HK scratched his head, “what’s a cinema?” 

“what does that mean? It makes no sense…” The oldest boy wrinkled his nose as he tried to figure it out. 

He pointed sternly at Isaia, “It’ll make a lot more sense once your balls drop and if I ever get to finish my story.” 

The boys settled back down so Draven took another drink and continued, “I decided to do a retelling of _The Bremen Town Musicians.”_

Oliver made a face, “what’s that?”

“A little kid story about some weird animals that wanna start a band,” Isaia answered with an over-exaggerated eye-roll.

“Like a band of raiders?” HK cocked his head in question. 

Isaia shrugged, “no, like music... But they _shoulda_ been raiders. The story woulda been a lot better that way.”

Draven smiled, “I agree… So that’s what I did. The four misfit animals in the story were very much like raiders anyway... They found one another, grouped up, then took a house from some other gang by tricking them and then defended it with violence when the gang tried to get it back… But I redid it much better and gave it a different ending.”

“Didya make it so the guys who had the camp kept it insteada getting their asses kicked by some dumb animals?” HK raised an eyebrow in curiosity as he took out a knife and idly started carving something into the table. 

“You’re going to have to let me finish my story if you want to know,” Draven smirked as he took the knife from the little hoodlum. 

Isaia perked up, “it’d be so cool to do Red Riding Hood but have the wolf eat her instead of getting killed.”

“Or Three Pigs,” HK nodded thoughtfully, “but the same wolf from Red Riding Hood and he’s also a badass raider and takes the pigs’ stuff.”

“And he shoots lightning from his claws!” Ollie added as he got onto his knees beside Draven and pantomimed shooting lightning at the other boys.

Isaia snorted at the little boy, “what the fuck is wrong with you?”

“No, that’d be kinda cool…” HK rubbed his chin as he thought about the lightning-wolf, “I’d read the hell outta that.”

“See, this is fun, isn’t it?” Draven smiled at the kids. Finally, something they found interesting and would read. For fun. Without being beaten over the head by the book. Perhaps there was hope for them yet.

They all nodded excitedly, each probably thinking up their own ridiculous versions of children’s books. Whatever worked to get them into reading and being creative rather than destructive little terrors was fine by Draven. 

After a moment, HK scooted his chair a little closer to the couch and cocked his head, “so how’d writing a weird kid story make you guys take over the world or whatever you said?”

Oliver settled down once more next to Draven and grinned up at him, “and when’s the part about aliens?”

“We’re animals,” the man continued his story, “pack animals, to be specific. As pack animals, we like to form groups with other individuals who share our values and passions. We all desire to be a part of a group that we can share our interests with. ‘Nerd out’ together, as it could be said.”

“More important to have strong people to be with,” HK pointed at Draven to drive the point.

“What good is being in a big group of strong people if you can’t trust them or don’t even like them?” The man waited for the kids to say something, but they just looked at each other in silence. “You build trust through first building some sort of relationship with people. You create relationships based on commonalities.” 

“Common… Tees…?” Ollie rolled the big word around his mouth.

“Commonalities,” Draven repeated for the young boy, “things you have in common.” He pointed the mouth of his bottle at each kid, “like how you three shits have terrorization in common. You have similar values and passions, so you get along and trust one another. Even when you disagree or fight among yourselves, you’ve become bonded together through sharing the things you enjoy doing and the shit you believe in.”

The three boys looked at each other again then smiled and nodded. 

Isaia cocked his chin thoughtfully, “it’s us versus them.”

“Kind of,” Draven shrugged, “but the best, strongest, and biggest groups are created with inclusivity more in mind. Less ‘us versus them’ and more ‘we’re just going to do our thing and you can join us if you like’... More of a live and let live mentality.”

HK agreed, “yeah, I don’t care what other people do so long as they leave me and my people alone to do what we like doing.”

“And that’s what Kate had in mind and a thing I agreed with wholeheartedly,” Draven smiled in remembrance. “It turned out that she’d recently lost half of her group around the same time I’d lost Henry, so she was also in the friend-finding market. That’s why she was more eager than I’d realized to have me join. Why she let me in so easily and set me up to work right away. She wanted to build her little group up and figured I could be a decent kickstart to the grand plan.”  
  


###  **\- - - - - - - - - - -**

I sat on a log staring at the recorder in my hands. “I guess the first thing I need is actors…”

“Obviously,” Ryan shrugged as he stood on the road pointing his own recorder at me. 

The man had been sent along to keep an eye on me while I was out on my venture. I could have almost been flattered, but he was there to guard the filming equipment and not me. It felt great to be with someone again, though, and I reveled in his companionship.

“Where do I find actors?” I glanced up at him then tried, again, to wave his recorder out of my face.

The man stepped back to avoid my hand swipes and he pointed, “you could be one… So that’s one down.”

“How about _you_ be one?” I smiled hopefully. I was more of a behind-the-camera type of person. 

Ryan held his recorder up, “I’m busy or I totally would…”

“Busy doing what, exactly?”

“Plan B,” he grinned, “if you get killed out here, at least I’ll have footage of it and a movie will get made, regardless of what happens to you.”

I stared at him, unsure of how I felt about that notion. I waved off his National-Geographic-animal-documentary-about-me idea and shrugged, “fine but I don’t want to be in the movie. Isn’t it a little pretentious to insert one’s self into their own story like that?”

“Naw,” he snorted, “people do it all the time. Just don’t be too obvious about it by making that character too awesome… Be the jackass.”

I glared. 

“What?” Ryan shrugged, “there’s four animals in the story as main characters and one is a donkey…”

I really wanted to argue, but he had a point. If I did choose to be a character, it should be the ass. After all, it was the jackass who started forming the group of animals in the story, just like I was now trying to do with finding a group of actors. 

But I had a problem with the idea in that I’d already written out the roles and relationships.

“The porn in this movie goes between the donkey and whoever plays the dog…” I pointed out. 

Ryan snickered, “dog and pony show is funny, but I still think it’d be better if you used the pussycat instead of the bitch dog…”

“Can you… Not... “ I sighed, “the donkey and dog spend the most time together so it makes the most sense for them to hook up, I don’t care how funny it would be, I’m not going to put two characters together just for giggles when it makes no sense--”

“Calm down, man,” Ryan laughed, “I’m just messing with you. We’ll just have to find some cute girl to play the dog is all. No biggie.”

“I don’t... “ I hesitated, “want to have sex with a stranger.” … And especially not for an audience.

Ryan finally lowered his camera. “Look, this is _your_ story, write it how you want. Porn doesn’t have to mean graphic penetrative sex, it can be a lot of things. And you don’t even have to do the things everyone suggested… How about we just go find some actors and you can figure it out as we go.”

That was a good idea. I was getting ahead of myself already and it hadn’t even been a full thirty minutes out the gate. The movie was supposed to be short and simple and didn’t even have to be good… But I was starting to really want to make something great that these people would really like... And that all started with writing a good story with believable characters.

And the ass and bitch went together, dammit.  
  


**\- - - - - - - - - - -**

Ryan said he knew a place people liked to hang out sometimes, but he failed to tell me how fucking weird these people were. I mean, we’re all weird, but these guys took the cake and set it on fire before throwing said cake in your face.

It wasn’t exactly the way they behaved that made them weird… They were… _Thespians._ Also not the weirdest part. 

They were thespians who had managed to somehow not only survive, but almost _thrive_ out in this shit new world despite their positive friendly attitudes and overly trusting nature. 

I’m not sure if that gave me hope for humanity or just made me really sad for people like them who would probably not make it long in the cruel world unless they joined some sort of alliance with stronger groups.

Maybe Ryan had the same thought because before I got to their little safehouse, he stopped just to inform me not to fuck the meeting up. 

“Look, we’ve been interested in getting these people to join us since we first found them a couple weeks ago,” he said quietly, “so it’d be cool if you could… You know… Be charming or something.”

“Do I look like a liaison to you?” I frowned, “and I’ll have you know, I’m charming as fuck.”

“Prove it, then, big boy,” he motioned to the building.

I hesitated. “What should I do?”

“Promotion...” Ryan shrugged and nudged me forward to the doorway, “smile, tell them what they want to hear, talk us up, suck some dicks... Whatever you have to.” He smiled and pat me on the shoulder, "the big three for predicting people: money, beliefs, and ego. Get a handle on what's driving someone and you know where you stand… Then you can work with that." 

I was greeted at the golf course clubhouse by a very young woman who was far too adorable and cheery for her own good. Her name was Petra and she reminded me of my friend Jakob in a painful way that made me sad all over again.

She introduced me to her brother, Luka, and my first knee-jerk reaction to the man was to stare stupidly at him, unsure if I should laugh or cry, while I watched him on a stage performing Hamlet’s soliloquy complete with a, very real, human skull. He was way too into the role. Thespians are a very… Unique breed of people, to be sure. 

“Lulu…” The woman got his attention and motioned to me and Ryan, “these guys need actors.”

I held up my camera to show what we were needing, exactly. Petra was a terrific agent, it seemed. Or something.

The man hopped off the stage and approached with an excessively grandiose stride, “ah! You saw my bit!” 

He shook our hands enthusiastically as if it were some sort of actual business arrangement for an acting gig. I’m not sure these guys realized the world had ended.

“I caught the tail end,” I tried my best to present myself like how I imagine a big-shot Hollywood producer would have. He seemed to be into that sort of shit.

“How did I do? Pretty good, yes? What part did you like the best?” His smile somehow got even bigger.

“I liked when it was over,” I shrugged and Ryan elbowed me sharply so I corrected with a thumbs up, “the end part. It was great.”

Luka either didn’t notice my initial comment, or he didn’t really care. He kept smiling and remained enthusiastic about his craft. There’s something admirable about that. 

They introduced us to a few other people in their group. A man and woman who were, apparently, a couple, and a guy they called Alfie that they touted as being a ‘special effects mastermind’… Then they followed that up with an A&B conversation laced with inside jokes and thespian language I didn’t fucking understand. You want to hear about aliens… Well, these guys were more alien than the actual little green men from Mars could ever hope to be. 

I explained the script to them, which I assured I had written down. I didn’t. I was mostly making the story up as I went along. 

Immediately, Petra piped up, “I dabble a bit in writing, myself, you know. I have a story that could be turned into a pretty good script.” 

She smiled expectantly at me as though she were waiting for me to ask all about it and then excitedly produce and film her idea. 

When I didn’t, Ryan spoke in my stead, “we’d love to check it out. Maybe we can get you working on making it a movie!” 

Petra nearly literally lit up. She went to a desk and dug her story out, immediately handing it to me. Her smile was so big… I couldn’t tell her I had no fucking interest in whatever she’d written… I just wanted to get my project done and settle my happy ass into the raider group. But her enthusiasm and adorable passion about her thing drew me in and I took the notebook with a smile and a nod.

“It’s about these wizards going to a special magic school…” She started to tell me all about her story and I immediately tuned it out.

“That’s great!” I had to stop her rambling, “but we need to work on this thing first. You help me, I’ll check your story out.”

“Deal!” She clapped her hands happily. 

The other woman, Frankie, sidled up beside me and smiled, “I wrote some stuff, too… Just things I wanted to read but couldn’t find,” she made an errant hand motion and shrugged, “sometimes you just need to take matters into your own hands when you want to see specific art, you know?”

Her husband agreed immediately with a grin on his face that led me to suspect they were probably talking about sexual acts of some sort that I would not be interested in. Or maybe I would… But not at the moment. With that thought, I started handing out roles to these people. Frankie and her husband, Kelly, would be perfect for the jackass and bitch. 

Except… Kelly made it clear he would rather be the cock from the story. There was no fucking way I could hook up the rooster and dog, but I told him we’d put a pin in that idea and start filming as soon as humanly possible. 

Alfie spoke up and I was just glad he didn’t want to tell me about some random thing he wrote, “have you scouted locations?” 

“Um…” I meant to pretend like I had all this shit handled. Meant to look professional. Oops. 

“You need locations. Props. Lighting. Etcetera, etcetera,” Alfie rolled his eyes. 

“Any ideas?” I smiled hopefully. 

Luka beamed, “we can use my gramma’s house for the bandit’s hideout!”

“Sounds good,” I said without asking any further questions. 

In hindsight, I should have asked one or two things...  
  


###  **\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -**


	3. To Grandmother's House We Go

  
  
  
  
  


###  **\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -**

Script: Check.

Four main characters: Check. 

Location: Um… Sure, why the fuck not.

Luka’s dear sweet grandmama's house looked like… Well… I guess at least it was a house still standing all in one piece. It was straight out of a fairytale, which was what I’d been going for anyway, but this was the wrong fairytale. The thing looked like a stereotypical grandma’s house. Almost like a gingerbread house made to lure kids in with a disarming diabetic coma level of sweetness. 

There were lawn gnomes. So many lawn gnomes. Pink flowery decorations in every room, wall to fucking wall, like what I imagine the inside of an actual faerie’s house to look. Roses. Countless pictures, vases, fine china, plush quilted bedding, etfuckingcetera all decorated with rose patterns. There was even an obligatory bowl of older-than-Jesus candies sitting out on the counter. I helped myself to them as I was trying to keep my mouth occupied with not making any sort of offhand comments. But I had so very many to make. 

Luka was in a nearly teary-eyed over-dramatic reverie about the place as he showed us around, making several comments about his childhood spent here in this home with his sweet grannie. It was the world’s strangest guided tour. The young man’s passion and enthusiasm for this shithole was something to behold… And it kind of got to me. I enjoyed seeing that passion for life. I’d been missing Henry so much that I immediately became somewhat attached to this drama queen as he rambled on about his gramma.

His young sister seemed to not care as much. She’d been born in a vault, so maybe she just had no connection to the place. Probably for the best. Petra was just interested in photos and picture albums of her gramma… Which she insisted on sharing with the group at length. Long length. As she was showing me the albums which contained no pictures of young children, it dawned on me… Luka wasn’t that much older than me. He had to have been born in a vault, too. 

Did his gramma live in this gingerbread house _after_ the bombs dropped? If so, how would they have made all these memories in only the timeframe of a buck-twenty since the vaults opened? Around that time I started thinking Luka was just off his fucking rocker. All the way off his rocker and rolled out the door into the street.

Before I could think of any ‘nice’ way to frame the many questions I had on the topic of insanity, Kelly called out from the hallway, “hey, Lulu… Did your gramma have a dog?”

“Oh, yeah,” Luka smiled as we made our way to the hall, “had a little pug. The poor little thing couldn’t breathe right and made sounds like a drunk person snorting the alphabet with every breath!” He laughed at the memory that I was pretty sure had been completely fucking fabricated, “this dang little pug, his name was Princess, and gram would dress him up in tutus and taught him how to dance! It was the cutest thing!”

Kelly leaned against the closed bathroom door and thumbed over his shoulder, “well… There’s a dog… But I’m pretty sure it’s not a pug… Unless radiation fucked it twelve ways to Sunday…”

The thing was definitely not a pug. It was hardly even a dog. As soon as the door was opened a crack, the mongrel started growling and trying to get at us. 

We stared at the door as the thing behind it started frantically scratching and literally throwing itself at the old wood.

“Well…” Petra finally broke our astonished silence, “we can find another house…”

Luka agreed, “my other gramma’s house is in the next town over and we could--”

“Bullshit it is!” I snapped at him out of frustration, “ _this_ house isn’t even _‘your gamma’s’_ house! That’s not your gramma’s stuff,” I motioned around, “not your gramma’s photos, and this sure as shit isn’t your gramma’s damn dog!” 

“I had you going though, didn’t I?” Luka grinned, “I am an astounding actor. Back in my days in the vault, I won best--”

“Not the time!” I cut him off and motioned to the door that was now being ripped apart from the inside, leaving a little hole in the rotted wood that the mongrel was quickly making larger.

I wanted this house. Finding a nice looking building that was still intact was nearly impossible and this was just a dumb mongrel. No problem. 

Ryan was standing back at the end of the hallway recording everything. He peered over the top of his camera and spoke casually, “hey, if you guys want to open the door and let it out, give me a heads up that we’re about to do a chase scene. I’ll need a safe distance…”

“Not helpful,” I glared at him. My cage had been thoroughly rattled and I was frustrated with this stupid situation. 

Luka gently nudged me away from the door, still smiling, and he pulled a pistol from the back of his belt. He put the muzzle near the hole the beast was working at and waited for it to present a good shot… Then he fired. 

The dog let out a sound then a thud against the bathroom floor and everything was silent. 

“Problem solved,” Luka pat me on the shoulder. “You need to learn to calm down. Perhaps a good daily meditation… Or alcohol.”

I just stared at the man stupidly for nearly a full minute as I tried to process his sudden personality change. 

“Awe…” Ryan nearly pouted as he lowered his camera, “that was anticlimactic…” 

“We should be sure it’s dead…” Alfie pointed to the door.

And with that, Ryan perked up and got his camera going again. "Insert something Shakespearean involving death and your inevitable doom here, and... Action!"

There was no real reason to make sure it was dead. Luka hit it, if it wasn’t dead it would have been soon… Hindsight is always 20-20, though, so of course we opened the door to check. 

The large mongrel had fallen behind the door and we had to shove it out of the way as the door was opened… Then someone had to step inside and go around the door to feed it a few more bullets. And that’s the proper way to check if something is dead, by the way.

The fucking thing was _not_ dead. 

It was hurt and pissed the fuck off.

Luka opened the door and Frankie wedged herself into the small gap we managed to form with the dog on the floor in the way. She put her arm in first in order to aim her pistol, and before she got a shot off, the mongrel jerked and slammed against the door, pinning her arm with a nice sick crunch. She reflexively tried to pull her arm back and ended up scraping off a good portion of skin that blood immediately started oozing from. 

But she never did drop the gun in her hand. I have no idea how. Frankie started firing blindly into the bathroom as me and Luka pushed against the door to free her arm.

The dog yelped with every impressive blind shot. 

I found out later why. The fucking thing had been mauling her arm and she was shooting it in the mouth and face as it attacked her hand and weapon. As soon as she was pulled free, me and Luka, in the throes of a crazy adrenaline rush, shoved the door open and unloaded on the dog… Which was dead. Triple-dead. For sure this time. 

Frankie’s arm was scratched up from the door, skin shredded from wood and dog-bites. It probably just looked worse than it was… I had been hoping, anyway. It looked pretty fucking bad. Smashed up cram doused in ketchup bad. 

We took her to the kitchen and got her up on the table as Petra pulled a first aid kit from her bag. This first aid kit contained bandages, as it should, but the majority of the box was taken up by two jars of clear liquid and some syringes that were more of the ‘street’ kind of drugs rather than the ‘doctor prescribed’ types I’d been expecting to see. 

But those drugs and homemade vodka had worked just as well, if not far better, than tylenol ever would have. 

After Frankie had downed half of a jar of the vodka and started to calm down from the first round of chems, Nurse Petra grinned at me, “vodka is a solution…”

“To every problem!” Her brother finished for her with a chuckle. 

And now one of my main stars was going to be in a perpetual state of inebriation as she healed. There was going to be no way in hell she'd be able to stand, let alone act. I plopped down in a chair and put my head in my hands, trying to calm my nerves and sort out the problem. _It was just a stupid mongrel._

Some lessons in life need to be gone over a few times before they really sink in… _Never let your fucking guard down._

Luka pulled out a chair, casually sat, and set something down in front of me. I blinked at the jar of vodka then glanced over to the man.

He pat me on the shoulder and smiled, “a solution to everything.” 

I scooted it closer and unscrewed the lid, sniffed at it, then made a face. It smelled like turpentine. Nuclear turpentine. And gasoline. 

Luka puffed his chest out, “I made it myself.”

I looked at it, “will it make me go blind?”

“Hasn’t made anyone blind yet!” He laughed.

Well… Why the fuck not. I held my breath and took a big swallow of the liquid. It tasted exactly how it smelled. But the shit was potent. The one big gulp was all I’d needed to be walking around the house like a fucking brain-damaged goose within twenty minutes. Note to self: Next time, take a smaller dose of Lulu’s Miracle Cure.

We decided to stick around the house for the rest of the morning to calm our nerves and recalibrate ourselves. By that I mean… Get drunk and eat a big lunch while we made sure Frankie would be okay. 

Petra, as it turned out, was more than just a great nurse… She was also a great gourmet chef. She’d managed to turn dog food, roach meat, fossilized corn, and shittatoes into a fancy four-star meal. Maybe I was too drunk to realize what I’d been eating, but it was the best food I’d had in a very long time. The girl was a gem. A sweetheart. A lot of other things that my drunk brain noticed. Or embellished. Not sure. 

There was a lot of that day that completely escapes my memory because Lulu’s Miracle Cure is also a solution to the pesky problem of thinking straight and remembering anything clearly. 

I remember singing. There was some dancing. I think I was dancing with Luka because he said I was doing it wrong and something about choreography or some shit. I don’t know. The point here is that alcohol is most definitely a solution. Chemically speaking, if nothing else. 

And, of course, I found out later that Ryan had recorded every bit of what happened. And no, you can’t see it. Ever.  
  


**\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -**

So, I had to rearrange the roles… And I was not happy about it. Because Frankie got hurt, I needed a new dog character and she informed me that her husband would not be performing sex acts with some other woman. Understandable, I suppose. Luka immediately stepped up to the plate and volunteered to be the dog instead of the cat as I initially planned him to be.

“The dog’s a chick,” I pointed out, yet again.

Luka pointed, “I told you, I am a great actor. Fetch me a fitting dress and I can be a chick. The bitch is a cool character… I will kill the role.”

I blinked at him. “Do you understand that this character is going to have a romance with the donkey?”

“Yeah,” Luka shrugged, “I can do romance.”

“He means porn…” Ryan chimed in.

Luka shrugged again, “that is fine by me, my friend. I am not shy.” 

Kelly rubbed his hands together with a grin, “does this mean I get to play the cock?”

 _“His_ cock?” Frankie pointed to Luka and snickered drunkenly.

“Not what I meant... “ Kelly chuckled at his wife. 

“I guess,” I rolled my eyes. Probably for the better, the man would do that role well. He’d already been practicing lines from the rooster, even though I had been telling him he’s not supposed to be the damn rooster.

And now I needed another ass to be the star. Couldn’t use Petra for obvious reasons, or Kelly, apparently… 

Ryan stood off to the side grinning smugly at me. 

“Fine!” I threw my hands up, “I’ll play the ass… But only use the footage if we can’t find someone else for it soon.” By ‘soon’ I meant ‘before any sex scenes happen’.

“Perfect!” Ryan clapped his hands excitedly, “Kate’s gonna love it!” He thought for a moment then snorted a laugh, “and it’ll make Jamus flip out. Bonus!”

So we had the roles lined out, again, and now we needed costumes… Apparently. Or so Alfie insisted. So we hit a department store and grabbed all manner of clothing and materials. I tried, several times, to talk Luka out of the dress idea, but he found a skirt that he said flattered him and insisted he should be allowed to wear it. He didn’t need to… I had been planning on stepping my happy ass out of the Jack role as soon as I found some chick to play the donkey in my stead. I even had it in my head to name the character Jenny… A play on words that I continuously laughed to myself about. It was quite clever, I don’t care what anyone says.

I’d mentioned that I wanted the animals to be things that’d been suggested by Kate’s group. The jackass was going to be the cowboy, sans hat and horse. The cat would be the spy, and because Petra was now playing that character and she was only eighteen, the spy was going to be the child of a spy. I had to admit the idea of spy kids was pretty fun and she rolled hard with it and had a great time. The rooster and dog were siblings who hunted cryptids as a family business. Hopefully, I could catch a wendigo or whatever on film, but the group all assured me that I don’t want to ever run across an actual wendigo, so Alfie set to work making a costume for one which he would wear. 

It had been coming together quite nicely and even fitting into this weird alternate universe from the original story. As it was working out, I started getting very excited to see my project finished. I became more interested in doing the project than just trying to toss a bunch of shit together to get into a group.

We still needed people to play the robbers who would be holed up in gramma’s house, but we were running out of daylight. We settled down in grannie’s house for the night and practiced lines all evening and I found that these thespians weren’t as bad as I initially gave them credit for. They had a lot of fun with what they did and celebrated sharing their passion about it with one another. 

When we started settling down to hopefully get some sleep, I ended up reading some of Petra’s story. I originally figured it’d be boring and lull me into a nice coma, but I ended up reading the fucking thing all night long. I couldn’t stop. It was pretty good… And then completely shocking as I stumbled blindly into a relationship that formed between two of the main male protagonists and some very graphic and kinky sex popped into the story. Many pages of it. Did I mention it was very detailed and kinky? It was. In spades. How did this adorable young woman write such… Outrageous sex? I was never going to be able to look at Petra the same.  
  


###  **\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -**


	4. Dropping Nukes

  
  
  
  
  


###  **\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -**

“You don’t need to wear that skirt,” I motioned to Luka. Admittedly, the outfit he was wearing _did_ flatter him, but it was unnecessary.

He looked down at himself and held the bottom of the skirt out, “I like it. It’s comfortable and convenient for when I need to shit. Plus, I can do this...” Luka did a spin to make the skirt twirl out, showing off his underwear to everyone in the vicinity. I suppose I should’ve just been thankful he had underwear on at all.

Ryan pointed to the skirt, “what he’s saying is… You don’t have to pretend to be a chick. It’s okay for the romance pair to be just two regular gay dudes.”

“That’s not what I’m saying…” I crossed my arms stubbornly for no reason.

Petra agreed, “kind of cool that way. Two big masculine men doing manly man things together and having great--”

“Not what I’m saying,” I had to cut her off before she delved too deep into her fantasies… Which I now knew all about since reading her story. They weren’t bad. Not at all. But that wasn’t what I’d planned for my story. It was like the characters were somehow disobeying me and taking on a life of their own without my permission. Did all writers have to deal with this shit?

Luka smoothed his skirt out and grinned, “well then, I will be a manly man who happens to wear skirts.”

“Oh, that’s a great idea!” Ryan nodded enthusiastically, “destroy the status quo!”

“Ryan…” I grumbled.

“It’s Declan now,” he continued to grin.

I just stared at him. Kate was right about his ridiculousness. 

“Declan is a great name,” Frankie said thoughtfully. 

He pulled out some dark sunglasses from his shirt pocket and put them on dramatically then struck a pose, “I have an entire character to go along with the new name, too.”

Frankie was now more excited than ever, “tell me all about it!”

“Don’t encourage him,” I waved a hand flippantly to the pair and turned back to Luka to continue practicing lines as we walked.

We managed to get some great footage as we went along looking for more people to play the robbers. The only problem with said footage was that I was in the majority of it as Jack. I’d started out only half-heartedly playing the role because, again, I was hoping to find someone else to do it… But as we went on, I started to really get into it and have more fun. Luka was a great help. He was so into his own role that I ended up falling into parts of the romantic build-up without even realizing it. There was probably more to that, but I never saw it at the time. 

When we came across a small group of people that contained a chick, I was beyond excited. She could play the ass. Hopefully. 

There’s probably something to be said about people's inherent level of weirdness. What makes us ‘weird’? When I first came across the movie-themed raider group, I thought they were fucking weird as glowing purple shit. But then here I was right in the thick of things making my own strange-ass movie right along with them. When I came across the thespians, you bet I thought they were strange… And, yet, here I was running around the wasteland with them practicing lines and having fun in their strange-ass thespian way. 

So, when we came across these new guys out on the road I never gave a thought to how fucking weird we appeared to them. This was now normal for me and I had seemed to already forget that, not two days prior, I had been on the other side of the fence. The bloody spiked, dead-body laden fence. Funny to think of shit like that now.

There were four of them in their group. They were a little standoffish at first, but when they realized we were the harmless type of crazy, they opened up a bit more. They said they found launch codes for a nuclear strike and were setting off to nuke the fuck out of some area. I think it was out of spite for the new world or maybe just for funsies since there was no longer anyone around to tell them not to. Whatever the case, I decided a huge red pin needed to be put in their idea. More like, their idea needed to be thrown in a barrel and set on fire and never mentioned again. I don’t think they realized what the repercussions of such an act would be. So, I tried to distract them with joining us, instead.

Again, Ryan, or Declan or whatever the fuck his name was now, told me not to screw it up. 

I told them I would help them with their ‘lay nuclear waste to the countryside’ idea so long as they helped us first along the way. My hope had been that maybe they’d forget about their batshit insane idea and join us, or maybe, that failing, I could disappear their launch codes in the night. 

And, wouldn’t you know it, one of the men came to me as we trekked back to grannie’s house and told me he wrote a thing. Of course he did. He was a lot more shy about the thing he’d written and didn’t seem to want any of his group mates knowing he’d done it. He passed it off as a personal journal… It was definitely not a personal journal. I read part of it as we took breaks from walking, finding I was becoming increasingly curious about other people’s projects.

This guy, Gary, was heavily into the idea of cloning and synthetic AI life. As if. But the concept was interesting and I continued to read. It was very poorly written and difficult to follow, so I ended up making notes in the margins of his notebook and fixing up some of the really bad grammar for him. I don’t know why the fuck I took the time to do that shit, but I did, so there it was. 

And when Ryan _\--Declan--_ whatever his name was got ahold of the notebook, he was captivated. The two of them were best friends forever by the time we got to grannie’s house and would not shut up about their ideas and theories. But they were happy and having a blast, so whatever, I suppose. Good for them.

I set up the woman, Sherry, to play Jenny and had her doing the lines with our skirt-wearing manly bitch-man. Sherry was a shit actor. I corrected her several times, showed her how it should be done, then cringed every time she did a line and slaughtered the character. But I suppose it was still better than me doing sexy-time scenes. Maybe. Not sure, but I think I had been starting to think they wouldn’t be so bad… And definitely not as bad as watching Sherry trying to act. _‘Trying’_ being the operative word.  
  


###  **\- - - - - - - - - - -**

HK’s face lit up, “you guys launched a nuke?”

“I didn’t say we launched it,” Draven snorted.

Isaia rolled his eyes, “you guys had a nuke and didn’t even use it? That’s really lame.”

Draven pointed a finger at the boy, “I also didn’t say that we didn’t.”

“Did you?” Oliver furrowed his brow at the man.

“What do you think?” Draven popped the top off a beer he’d found under the couch and took a swallow of the piss-warm liquid. 

The boys looked at one another for a moment then to Draven in confusion. 

HK waved a hand, “I think you’re drunk is what I think.”

“Not nearly drunk enough,” Draven mumbled before taking another swallow of the craptastic flat beverage. The word ‘beverage’ was giving it too much credit… It was hardly drinkable. 

Isaia thought for a moment then grinned, “so this new group sounds cool… Were they pretty tough?”

“They were cool,” Draven smiled fondly in remembrance, “do you know what makes a society?”

HK pointed, “you said sharing the same values and beliefs with each other…”

Oh, good, at least one of them had been paying attention. 

“That’s what makes good groups and tight bonds. It’s essential, but not the main thing that makes a society and civilizations.” Draven paused to gather his thoughts and sort them through the alcoholic buzz. “The sharing of knowledge.”

Isaia rubbed his chin, “but… If a group of people already have the same beliefs and like the same stuff, don’t they already know everything the other people know?”

“Never,” Draven pointed his bottle at the boy. “There will always be things people know that other people don’t. Always.”

“Not if they have two heads,” Ollie gave a sage nod as though he’d said something profound. 

HK wrinkled his nose at the younger kid, “if a person has two heads, they’re still only one person.”

“Are they?” Draven cocked an eyebrow.

“No, they’re two people,” Oliver stood his ground.

“They’re one,” HK argued back at him then looked to Isaia to break their debate and choose a side.

The oldest boy shrugged, “I don’t know… If you see a brahmin or radstag with two heads or an opossum with three, it’s still only one animal... “

“See?” HK gloated.

“But,” Isaia continued, “it’s an animal. We call it one animal because it only has one body that we can eat meat from. We judge it by what we eat. We don’t eat people… I mean… I guess some folks eat people, but it’s not the same.”

And that really _was_ profound. 

Draven smiled proudly at the oldest boy, “there it is. Even though you three have grown up together and have similar values, you have different opinions on certain topics. Sharing that view and discussing it makes you all stronger and smarter. Sharing what you think and what you know with others makes them smarter and advances your society.”

“But I think he’s wrong…” Ollie pointed to HK and made a face.

“It’s okay to disagree,” Draven pat the little boy on the knee to reassure him, “so long as you respectfully disagree and don’t start any wars because you think he’s wrong.”

“What does that have to do with the group?” Isaia scratched his head. “Is it because they wanted to drop nukes and you didn’t cuz you’re a pansy?”

“You mispronounced _‘smart’_... And sort of,” Draven continued, “they knew a lot of shit that we didn’t and we knew shit they didn’t know.”

“Like how to play pretend,” Isaia snorted.

“And how to write weird sex stories,” HK added.

Oliver threw in his two cents, “and how to play dress up.”

Draven frowned at the youngest boy beside him, “I thought you were on _my_ side… Remind me to explain conformity to you little shits sometime.” 

“Isn’t that what this story is all about?” Isaia pointed.

“No,” Draven immediately tossed out then took a breath, “not entirely. It’s not the same.” ... It kind of was. 

Oliver wrinkled his nose, “what’s that?”

Isaia answered for the man, “it’s when you do what everyone else does just to fit in.”

“It’s kind of important... “ Draven shrugged. “We’ll go over it some other time, right now, you’re going to shut your pie holes and let me finish my fucking story.”  
  


###  **\- - - - - - - - - - -**

Gary sat with the other men from his group, brothers Kevin and Kyle, at gramma’s table. He motioned to Alfie, “so… You’re gonna scare us out of the house with your shit-ass wendigo costume?”

Alfie looked down at himself and the costume he’d fashioned from the dead mongrel dog, “this is a perfect rendition--”

“No it isn’t,” Kevin snorted, “you ever even seen an actual wendigo, mate? Things are the stuff of nightmares.”

“They’re skinny, for one,” Kyle added with a hand motion, “and I don’t think seeing a wendigo outside the window would make the robbers actually want to run out there with the thing… They’d bar the doors and hide.”

I sighed, “just roll with it for the sake of the story, alright?”

Petra thought for a moment then pointed to Alfie, “what if the wendigo got inside? Then the robbers would run. And it’ll be dark… They’d just see some monster and run.”

“I wouldn’t,” Kevin crossed his arms, “I’d unload on the fucker and kill it. Never allow a windego to live. Ever. Set them on fire… They’re ridiculously weak against fire.”

Luka chuckled, “I am pretty sure most living things are weak against fire, my friend.”

“No, like, _extra_ weak…” Kevin cocked his chin, “we know from experience.”

“That’s why we have these,” Sherry pulled a molotov from her bag. 

Frankie sidled up next to the woman and pointed, “can you show us how to make those? Just in case?”

“Absolutely. It’s pretty simple, really. And so is napalm,” Sherry beamed, happy to share her expertise in a thing.

“Alright, you little destructo-fire-brigade,” I pressed pause on their strange schoolhouse daily destruction lesson, “can we do some filming for a bit then learn how to make bombs out of paperclips, toenails, and pencil lead?”

“Actually,” Kyle put a finger up, “the way to make a bomb is--”

“Later,” I cut him off. Admittedly, I really did want to learn all this stuff, it seemed like very useful knowledge. Just… Not right that moment. 

Before we even got to filming the scene, Sherry turned to me with one of those smiles on her face that clearly read she was about to tell me some wild-ass idea. 

And she did. “So, Luka is a bitch dog, right? And your wendigo costume looks more like a dog than a wendigo…” Her smile somehow got even bigger, “what if Luka is a werewolf?” 

I blinked at her stupidly.

“I love it!” Luka beamed then turned to me, “please? Think of how awesome it’d be! A cryptid hunter who is also a cryptid, himself! And he uses the werewolf form to scare the robbers and then--”

“I don’t know…” I cut off his rambling. It was a pretty cool idea, but not what I had planned. Of course, I’d been just rolling with all these little plot rats that’d been popping up all over the place anyway. I threw my hands up, “you know what? Why the fuck not.”

Behind me, Frankie had been thinking really hard about the implications of a werewolf character. “Do you think… When the werewolf has sex… You know, like what does his penis look like? Is it dog-like or--”

“Okay,” I pointed at her, _“--that’s--_ why the fuck not…”

Sherry gave a little shrug, “I don’t know, I think it’s kinda… Hot. It’d be thrilling to have a relationship with a super-wild alpha male…”

“I know, right?” Frankie put her hand on Sherry’s arm and the two of them started tossing fantasy-driven drug-fueled ideas out about the entire idea of werewolf relationships. 

I was pretty sure that, if they hadn’t already, they would soon be writing stories about it. It wasn’t something I’d be interested in, but if Sherry was cool with her character fucking wolf-men, that was on her. 

So I rewrote my mental script to allow Luka to be a damn werewolf. He was thrilled. The man’s constant optimism and child-like excitement about things was contagious, however, and I quickly came around to the idea. It was pretty fun and made my story a lot better. I was now completely into this movie and getting it finished. I was excited seeing it come together and be a lot more awesome than I ever thought it would be.

Now, I think it’s important I tell you all something about life, luck, and shitstorms. Life is full of shitstorms. There’s ups and downs and no such thing as good or bad luck. It might look like good luck when life is going how you want, then appear to be bad luck when a shitstorm comes out of nowhere and takes a crap on your head. You have choices, during the storm. Well, you always have choices, even if some of them suck, but you always have choices… But in a shitstorm, you can give up, lay down in the fetal position, and cry yourself into a stupor… Or you can weather it for a bit, then pick through the aftermath and rebuild. 

Storms don’t last forever. 

Luka was a master of optimism. Or, rather, he’s a master of just rolling with whatever happens and making the best of it. The world needs more people like him. 

If it wasn’t for Frankie getting hurt, I would have never had to find someone else to fill her role. I would have never played the role myself in the time between and found that I liked it. Don’t you ever fucking tell anyone that. I found myself wanting to actually play the role. With Luka. The werewolf. 

So, if it wasn’t for what happened next… I would have never gotten the chance to fully play the role, which I’d actually been doing all this time without even realizing it. 

And who knows, maybe I would have never lived long enough to tell this story, or stayed with this group of people, or learned how to build explosives, or launched a fucking nuke, or become a raider, or killed other people, or fallen in love.  
  


###  **\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -**


	5. The Sun Will Shine

  
  
  
  
  


###  **\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -**

I wonder if other people, long ago, learned about animal behavior by getting mauled by bears, lions, wolves, and koalas. Don’t laugh, a koala looks fluffy and cute but they will fuck your entire world up. I guess it doesn’t matter, koalas don’t exist anymore. But you know what does exist? Wendigos.

They’d been correct when they said I never want to see one. And, little did I know, I was about to get a rough and fast school of hard knocks lesson about wendigos… 

We’d been filming for a couple hours into the night and attracted unwanted attention. Maybe it was our voices and loud laughter, maybe it was the extreme amount of lighting we needed to use, or, maybe, it was the smell of Alfie’s high-fashion dead-dog outfit that Luka was sporting…

But whatever it was, it made an actual real-life, terrifying-as-all-hell, wendigo come calling. The fucker came out of the bushes behind us and immediately jumped on the first person it could get ahold of. 

That person happened to be Sherry. 

I don’t know if Luka was so into his werewolf role at the time that his brain malfunctioned or what, but he jumped on the thing. Fucking jumped on it! That man has balls of steel. He tried to pull it off Sherry to let her get away, then Petra ran into the mess to help her brother. 

I felt myself compelled to act. Defend these people I’d only just met. 

But I knew fuck all about this creature or the situation. What the fuck are you supposed to do when a nightmare creature is trying to literally eat your comrade’s face? 

The guys playing robbers in the house immediately came to help. Kyle grabbed Sherry and got her back in the house and as soon as she was away from the beast, we all ran inside. 

Kevin pushed an armchair in front of the door and pointed, “see what I mean? That shit doesn’t make you wanna go out there, does it?”

I nodded dumbly. “What the fuck do we do?”

And, what we did, was run upstairs into a bedroom, immediately barring that door, too. Kyle was digging items out of Sherry’s pack and held up the molotov with a grin. 

Petra and Frankie went to work helping Sherry, who seemed okay. Mostly. Sort of. If you count ‘okay’ as bleeding all over the room from some wicked head wounds as being okay.

I looked out the window and saw the creature pacing below as it tried to figure out how to get inside and up to us. The thing really was pants-shittingly scary. A skirt would have come in handy about then… 

Kyle nudged me to the side and lit the molotov… Then dropped it out the window onto the beast below. 

“Fire,” Kyle grinned as he gave a curt nod then was moved back as Luka, Kelly, and Alfie tried to crowd the window to see the beast.

It shrieked louder than should be possible by the laws of biology and started flailing as it caught fire and went up like kindling soaked in jet fuel. 

“Eat shit!” Kelly laughed at the thing and the others followed suit in shit-talking the dying beast.

And it was all fun and games… Until the fucking thing threw itself through the downstairs picture window into the house. On fire and still alive. Flailing around the damn living room and igniting all the rose-laden grandma-decor. I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t thought of setting the gaudy house on fire, but this was definitely not what i’d had in mind. I heard it crashing through the china cabinet and thudding against walls, shrieking and wailing, and smoke started to fill the bedroom. 

Well, shit. 

The old rotted wood of the house started burning like paper out from under us and the best option, at the time, was to jump out the window. There wasn’t really any time to debate it. No time to wonder if there may have been more of the things out there or how we were going to get our injured person out. 

We tried to wait as long as possible so the wendigo-flambe downstairs would be closer to dead, and then Luka jumped out the window first and everyone followed as best they could. 

The sprained ankles and bruises were much better than having our faces eaten by a wendigo, so I guess it was a success. 

We ran to another house down the road and barred ourselves in. Well, I say ran, but really we hobbled quickly. 

Upstairs in the new dilapidated house, I stood at the window and watched grannie’s house burn. We were alive… But I’d lost the damn house I’d been fighting for. I felt like my project would never get finished and I was going to have to trash it and start something new. Maybe do Petra’s story, instead. I was overreacting, of course, but at the time I had been so overwhelmed that all I could think about was this shit moment and that everything was fucked. I didn’t know what I was going to do and uncertainty is a thing that really screws with most humans. 

And I started thinking of my vault friends, Jakob and Henry. Weird how those thoughts hit me so hard and suddenly. We could have lost Sherry, and she wasn’t completely out of the woods yet… We could still lose her. I hardly even knew the woman, but it was already fucking with me to think she could die. We could have lost Luka or Petra. I could have lost them. My new groupmates. My new friends. Family. I could have been left all alone once more and the thought terrified me. That house burning down was more than just a house burning down… It ignited all these fears within me and I couldn’t stand those thoughts. 

I felt someone put an arm around me and I blinked myself out of the stupor I’d been in. I wiped my eyes. I’d been crying and never even realized it. And don’t you fucking tell anyone that. 

Luka squeezed my shoulders tight and smiled at me, “don’t worry, my friend, my other grandma’s house is just in the next town over.”

I snorted. Then laughed. Then gave a nod and rested my head on the man’s shoulder as he held me. There was hope. Not that there was an actual other house to use, but he’d meant that everything would work out and be fine. We’d regroup, pick up the pieces, and continue on. 

The sun will shine and the shitstorm won’t last forever.  
  


###  **\- - - - - - - - - - -**

We needed to return to the Grindhouse in order to get more meds for Sherry. Nurse Petra had prescribed her a good dose of drugs and alcohol, as any great doctor would naturally do, and she seemed to be doing alright. The I’ll-probably-live-for-now sort of alright. She could walk, at any rate.

As we were leaving, I took another look over my shoulder at grannie’s house, which was now more like grannie’s smoldering ash-heap. 

“What am I supposed to do now?” I said to nobody.

And Declan replied in ‘nobody’s’ stead, “don’t worry, I got it all on film…”

“What?” I blinked stupidly at the man.

“Yeah,” he held his camera up with a grin, “every bit of it! Even the romantic bits between Jack and Wolf-boy.”

I furrowed my brow, “there were no romantic bits…”

“Says you,” Declan shrugged, “but don’t worry, I got it all.” He turned the camera over in his hands and stared at it as he thought for a moment. “Make a couple tweaks to the ending of your story and you got yourself a finished movie... And then it's on to the hellfire of editing.”

“Declan, what romantic bits?” I was still stuck trying to figure out what the shit he had meant by that. There were no ‘romantic’ bits. 

He continued to dodge the question, “name’s Duncan now.”

Gary motioned to nothing in particular, “you could have the characters end up working together to defeat the wendigo… You know, like how it actually happened.”

Declan… Duncan... Ryan... Whateverthefuck his name was nodded his approval, “it’s a good idea, since I already filmed it all.”

“I like it… It’s a great twist,” Kelly agreed.

It really was a good idea and a cool twist… The weird-ass story I had originally thought of days ago had now become a parody of my actual life. Except for one thing…

“What fucking romantic bits?!” I gave an emphatic shrug and looked to the people around me.

They just laughed.

Luka smoothed his skirt and brushed his shoulders off, making a show of it, then grinned, “we should do more scenes as we travel that include the new ending, yeah?” 

“Absolutely,” Whateverhisnameis said as he started up his camera once again, putting the fucking thing right in my face.

I waved him away, “I have no idea how the end is going to go now, Deacon… Deaclan… Whatever… Let me think on it.”

“Ooh!” The man tucked his camera under one arm and got a notepad out to write, _“Deacon._ That’s a good one.”

I stood there blinking stupidly at the man for nearly a solid minute.

Kevin nudged me with his elbow as he walked past, “just wing it, mate.”

And, with that, I was left to ‘just wing’ the fuck out of the ending. Appropriately, it ended with us going back to the Grindhouse to live happily ever after… 

Just kidding. 

We launched that fucking nuke.  
  


###  **\- - - - - - - - - - -**

HK practically jumped out of his chair and pointed at Draven, “I knew it!”

Oliver stood up on the couch then perched his ass on the back of it and bounced excitedly, “was it big? What’d it look like? Did it sound loud? How did you--”

“Calm down,” Draven rolled his eyes as he grabbed the little boy’s leg and pulled him back down onto the couch cushions. 

“But what was it like? How much did it destroy?” Isaia managed to stay seated… still on the table-top. 

Draven let their anticipation grow a bit before he leaned forward and motioned with his hands, “it was… Awesome!” 

The boys started getting excited again and Draven had to work to calm them down.

“Aren’t you curious about what happened to Sherry and how my movie debut turned out?” The man leaned back and put an arm over the back of the couch casually, “cuz, I’ll have you know, it got rave reviews…”

Isaia rolled his eyes, “we know what happened to her. She lives here. She obviously didn’t die.”

“And we know how that other stuff went, too… You know… The romantic bits with your boyfriend,” HK smirked.

Ollie looked thoughtful for a moment then scooted closer to Draven, “I wanna know how the movie was.”

Take that, conformity! 

Draven smiled down at the little boy, “it was amazing. Everyone joined the Grindhouse and ended up sharing their stories, some they made into movies of their own that took us out for more adventures and landed us many more group members as we traveled and changed camp locations when the Grindhouse got fucked, which is another story for another time. We changed the initiation to allow for people to write stories or make movies and we’d share them and help one another with ideas. We shared knowledge, made lasting memories, reveled in one another’s projects… Even if whatever they did wasn’t our cup of vodka.” He thought for a moment then snorted a laugh, “Petra made her wizard story into a movie… Lulu and I played the main male protagonists. I found a love of writing and acting I never thought I’d ever have… But there it was.”

HK smiled, “can I watch mom’s movie? Do you still have it?”

Draven snorted a laugh, “maybe when you’re older… Much older.”

“But…” Ollie scratched his head, “what was the ending of your movie?”

“Yeah,” Isaia motioned to the little boy, “what he said. You’ve told us the whole story _about_ the story but never said how it actually went. What’s the actual movie?”

Draven smiled, “my story was never about the plot of my movie… It was about the people and the community we formed all across the country.”

Oliver pointed at the man, “you said there was gonna be aliens.”

“Define for me what an alien is?” Draven raised an eyebrow at the boy beside him.

“Little green men from Mars,” he immediately replied. 

Draven shrugged, “well then, I must have lied.”

Ollie wrinkled his nose and nearly pouted at that and HK motioned, “I don’t think he lied… He just doesn’t think aliens are what aliens are is all.”

The man winked at HK and shot him a finger-gun. 

“That’s dumb,” Oliver protested, “aliens are aliens. You shoulda put them in your movie. Like, _real_ aliens. With plasma pistols and everything.”

Draven snorted, “and Lulu shoulda shot lightning from his fingers, right?”

“Yes,” the little boy gave a sharp nod.

“And ate pigs,” HK added with a grin.

Isaia put his hands out toward the boys, “what if he’d been an allegory for something else? Like… I don’t know… The monster in all of us or something…”

Draven blinked at the oldest boy. He had no idea the kid knew the meaning of the word _‘allegory’_ … And his idea was brilliant.

HK thought about the idea for a moment then rubbed his chin, “what if the pigs, instead of being eaten, are a bunch of raider kids and the wolf is like… Something they’re scared of but doesn’t exist and… I don’t know…”

“So the piggie-boys,” Draven pondered, “they have to survive and work together while fighting this allegory monster… And they’d either cooperate, or start fighting among themselves and become the monster they fear?”

Isaia pointed excitedly, “yes!”

“I like that,” HK nodded his agreement.

Ollie made a face as he thought about it, “that’d be fun… But can there still be lightning powers and aliens?”

“I don’t know… Maybe,” Isaia shrugged. 

HK pointed at Draven, “see? You shoulda done that.”

The man raised an eyebrow at the boys, “you think you can do better than my story?”

They all nodded enthusiastically.

“Fine,” Draven handed his recorder over to Isaia, “go. Do better. Recreate Lord of the Flies… It’s perfectly fitting.”

The oldest boy took the camera carefully and turned it over in his hands. He stood up and the other two stood with him. They were excited and thinking up all the possibilities now. Hopefully, they’d involve the other kids from camp and something amazing would be created. Something amazing… A tight group of friends who share the love of creativity and imagination. Family who helps one another, respectfully disagrees, shares victories, is there for one another when shit gets difficult, shares knowledge and ideas… Or, who the fuck knows, they may just end up killing each other exactly like in Lord of the Flies.

Just before the boys left, Draven called over his shoulder to them, “I highly recommend you outline your story…” He snorted a laugh, “just saying.”  
  


###  **\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -**


End file.
